NCAA president says there will be no fall sports championships; doesn’t affect football
NCAA President Mark Emmert said on Thursday that there will be no fall championships this calendar year for all Division I sports except football.
Emmert made the announcement during a video posted on the NCAA Twitter page, and said the reason was there are not enough schools left participating.
Several Division I conferences, including the Big Ten and Pac-12, have postponed fall sports. College fans are still waiting on word from the ACC, SEC and Big 12, all of whom have said they will try and compete this fall.
Football is not affected because its playoffs are overseen by the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). But for every other NCAA Division I sport, including volleyball, soccer and field hockey, there will be no NCAA championships played in 2020.
“Our board of governors said if you don’t have half the schools playing the sport you can’t have a championship,” Emmert said in the video. “Sadly, tragically, that’s going to be the case this fall, full stop.”
Emmert went on to say that his staff has been working on a potential solution where those teams can compete for championships in the winter or spring.
“There are ways to do this,” Emmert said. “I’m completely confident that we can figure this out. If schools and conferences want to move forward, and more than half of them want to do it and that’s surely the indication right now, then let’s do it.”
Emmert said teams should use the fall to keep healthy and engaged with their coaches, practice and focus on academics. Emmert added the highest priority has to go to the winter and spring sports, who all lost their championships last March, when COVID-19 shutdown the NCAA Tournament and championships for winter and spring sports.
“First and foremost we are going to protect those spaces,” Emmert said in the video.
Emmert talked about “modifying the model” and shrinking the brackets to accommodate fall and winter and spring sports competing for championships during the same seasons. The ideal situation would be to use predetermined sites for those championships to cut down on travel for the teams.
This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 6:49 PM.